


millimeters

by stillmadaboutpetra



Category: Yuri!!! on Ice (Anime)
Genre: Character Study
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-31
Updated: 2017-01-31
Packaged: 2018-09-21 01:05:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,035
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9524750
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stillmadaboutpetra/pseuds/stillmadaboutpetra
Summary: He’s not sure when or how but the scissors from the drawer by the coffee maker and the little toaster are in his hands, and he has the hair over his shoulder and its so thick that when he cuts it, it sounds like cutting raw flesh, like poultry sheers through a flay of white fat.





	

**Author's Note:**

> people get mad when i shave my head and then i got drunk and thought about victor

In a hotel bathroom after he takes gold at his final junior competition, Victor  Nikiforov confronts the line between selfish and selfless. A matter of less of himself rather than a depth of self. It’s a line pinched between thumb and forefinger, held out to glisten under a bright circle of lights surrounding the vanity mirror.  
  
His mother had had hair like him. White in childhood and at the croak of puberty, it’d plunged into an early gray. She’d let it grow darker but he kept after his with brightening shampoos and conditions. Silver. Ha! It was the only silver he wore in public. He clashed metal with his accolades, gold tacky against the mink of his hair spilled around his shoulders.  
  
Teen girl magazines slobbered over beauty secrets he regurgitated from columns they had printed ten years prior. Vinegar rinse-wash to remove product and salt sprays and dry shampoo for less damaging lift when it came to texturizing an updo. Podium Pretty Boy Victor Nikiforov. How he shined. Sure, his face got powdered and his lips shellacked with tacky stains but his hair -- fluffed and combed and sprayed and teased. Flyaways tucked behind his ears, smoothing serum from some low-grade primpers applied liberally. Hair!  
  
The skate before his very last, he’d had it back in a high ponytail, bobby pins jabbing his skull to keep the lift high and tight, his hair spritzed and wild with cosmetic glitter. But last night, his final competition, he’d ripped it all out as he’d drifted onto the ice. Yakov had screeched off to the side. The headache running the back of his neck had receded. Hed never skated with it free for a competition, not since it crawled past his chin. But he had, and it had been snake tongues around him, a coil and web of movement, sticking to his glossy lips, obscuring his vision. He’d skated near blind and changed his hand motions to compensate for brushing it away, each time chest heaving, bowing his back, changing, moving with it, letting it move him.  
  
And now it hung in a squall, put away wet and slept on. Knots crinkled when he scrubbed them, a ccchhhh sound crumpled in his hand.  
  
Pretty. Beautiful. Stunning. Angelic. Otherworldy. Divine. Envy. Pride. Magical.  
  
There’d been a shoot where they’d braided it around his face, obscuring him completely. He’d had on his all-black athletic practice clothes, black skates. His silver hair and the slender silver dart of blades beneath his feet suspended against black.  
  
He picks up a clutch. It’s thin, feathery. It floats down from his fingers like gossamar. Elvish. Wild. He flips his head over and cards his fringer through it to snag on knots, on tangles that jump hot pain on his scalp, pulling baby hairs around his neck.  
  
How boring. Long hair. He’s had it forever. He loves it. Everyone loves it. It’s as famous as he is. Victor Nikiforov. Victor Nikiforov’s hair. He’d joked once, on a talk show, that it was insured for more money than he was. The host had asked to touch it.  
  
Yakov said no mores curls. No more bombshell curls, no more pigtails. No more poofs. Wear it back, Vitya. Keep it off your face.  
  
Victor tugs it over his face now, brings it taught against his cheeks, then straight down, choking it beneath his chin, sticking his tongue out through it, tasting the nothing-dry of it. Hair is dead after all. Sometimes he dreams about it, about chewing it like a rodent. It crumbles like vermicelli, grinds like grass. He eats it all off until it sticks frayed and shocked around him, an electric exclamation.  
  
He’s not sure when or how but the scissors from the drawer by the coffee maker and the little toaster are in his hands, and he has the hair over his shoulder and its so thick that when he cuts it, it sounds like cutting raw flesh, like poultry sheers through a flay of white fat. Strands cling to his sleep shirt and its dead in his hands. He lets it fall onto the hotel carpet. It’s nothing on the ground. A savaged sick pelt. He almost cuts his ear when he hacks higher. It sounds good when he cuts. The scissors drag on his scalp and the hairs pull, just so, on the too-dull edges. These are tools meant for paper, for plastic. They work just as well as the razor fine blades of his regular stylist. Better. They’re so much more effective in his hand, do so much more with a few snips. He presses the blades flat against his head and cut so there are nearly-bald spots among angry furrows. He’s been pulling on his hair, scratching his scalp, and for the first time he can see it radiating unhappy pink. He trails hair throughout the hotel room, cutting errantly as he returns to the bathroom.  
  
He looks terrible. He’s missed a spot in the back entirely and it hangs like the tail on a killed animal. He cuts it quickly, crying. He’s ugly. His forehead is huge. His ears stick out. His face is naked and hovering, white and ghastly and the wall behind him is white and ghastly, and he looks like a doll misaligned and kept vertical by accident.  
  
He calls Yakov. Yakov comes in yelling at him through the tears and then sits Victor down on the  toilet and takes his electric razor and then it’s noisy, a muting noise, and Victor stop crying through the rattle against his bones.  
  
“Never do that again,” Yakov orders him,  
  
He’s naked now, pale skull and a fuzzy shimmer of silver. It’s freezing. It’s so cold. He gets one magazine spread. They put lots of eye makeup on him so his eyes are huge and he looks like a misprint of a human, whipcord lean, a punched up red mouth and too-bright eyes and the alien look of his skull. He gets used to his face, to only his face. He starts to like not being able to disguise himself; funnily enough, no one recognizes him anymore. No one calls him pretty boy anymore. He looks like an infant, exposed.  
  
  



End file.
